All of the material in this patent application is subject to copyright protection under the copyright laws of the United States and of other countries. As of the first effective filing date of the present application, this material is protected as unpublished material. However, permission to copy this material is hereby granted to the extent that the copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent documentation or patent disclosure, as it appears in the United States Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
Not Applicable
This invention is directed to client-server computing and more particularly to managing download requests over resource limited networks and resource limited gateways.
The continued exponential growth of the Internet, has resulted in surges in demand for Internet resources (computing and communication, e.g., file serves) not anticipated by designers of Internet infrastructure. A familiar case in point is the situation of an Internet service providers (ISP) customer base growth outstripping its infrastructure (e.g., number of dial up servers, the bandwidth of its connection) development.
A surge in demand for Internet resources can also be an aperiodic event, such as the demand on the file servers of a software distributor triggered by the release of a much anticipated new application program. Such an aperiodic surge in demand may not justify investment in new file serves, and higher bandwidth connections since it may be an infrequent occurrence.
When a file server receives a request for a file, the file is broken up into a large number of pieces (e.g., datagrams) at one or another layer, (for example the transport control protocol TCP layer) of the communication protocol stack, and sent back to the requesting client. When, in the course of a surge in demand, the same file server receives a number of requests for one or more files from a number of different clients, the sending of pieces of the various requested files to the various requesting clients are interleaved in the time domain. And although client-server topologies are useful, they are not without their shortcomings.
One shortcoming with servers is that many times they are resource limited. For example, if the file server is overloaded, it""s speed in servicing all the file requests will become the limiting factor (rather than the available bandwidth) in determining the time required to fulfill the file requests. Because of the interleaving of sending of pieces of different files in the time domain, a large number of users will experience an inordinately in extended download time. The time is inordinate in consideration of the file size and the limiting bandwidth of the connection between the file server and the requesting client.
Another shortcoming with client-server topologies, is that during an inordinately extended download client resources continue to be tied up in servicing the download, which is disadvantageous to the client user. The client user does not have positive information as to the server status, and can only infer from the delay in performing the download that some computer or communication resource involved in the download is at fault. Slow downloads and the lack of information for the client user as to the cause of the slowness may lead to increased client user anxiety, and dissatisfaction with the Internet experience. In an ecommerce application of the Internet uncertain delays in transferring files (e.g., recently released requests for quotations RFQ""s) can have an adverse monetary impact.
Accordingly, a need exists to overcome the above shortcomings and to provide a system for efficiently managing the resources of a file server in order to obtain shortened download times and to provide client feedback of the server load status.
Another situation in which the rapid development of the Internet has created a situation in which certain resource (computing/communication) may lag in development and become limiting factors, is the case a firewall/proxy server software and hardware which serves as a gateway between an Intranet, and the Internet. Security rational suggests having a low number of gateways from Intranet to the Internet, to limit the avenues through which a security breach can be made. Having a lower number of gateways limits the available bandwidth for communication between the Intranet and the Internet according to the available processing power on the gateway computers for running the firewall/proxy server software.
One shortcoming with communication resources such as gateways is like servers, they have limited resources. In situations where one or more requests are made for the same network resource, gateways do not intelligently handle the duplicative requests. One example of typical duplicative requests is the use of web crawlers. Web crawlers are automated programs for obtaining files from the Internet. Like web browsers employed by human users, web crawlers issue Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests for web documents, identified by a uniform resource identifier (URI). However due to there automated nature web crawlers, may place a high demand on gateway throughput capacity. Web crawlers may for example be employed to build indexes for search engines.
However, in contrast to a human users who expect real time response, HTTP requests issued by web crawlers are usually not considered so time sensitive.
Web crawlers and/or multiple or the same user using a web browser from an Intranet may repeatedly request the same web resource (identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)), in the course of some specified period of time. For example multiple instances of a web crawler performing a similar function from a companies Intranet may have the need to access the same resource repeatedly. The resource may be routinely accessed in the course of conducting the company""s business. Each time the resource is needed, the request must be issued through the gateway, and separately consume a portion of the gateways bandwidth.
Accordingly, a need exists to overcome the problem of duplicative through a network resource with limited capacity such as a gateway. What is particularly needed is a system for avoiding overloading of communication resources by duplicative requests for Internet web resources.
Briefly, according to a first embodiment of the invention a computer network comprises a file server, a file server application installed on the file server a client computer, a client application installed on the client computer, a proxy server application installed on the file server, the proxy server application operative to receive a file request from the client application, send a client side applet to the client computer and send the client side applet information selected from a group of network resources consisting of a time to start a download of the file, a time to complete the download of the file, and a count of other file requests received by the file server.
Briefly, according to a second embodiment of the invention a system for managing es the available bandwidth through a gateway from one network to another comprises a plurality of client applications, a plurality of client side components which interoperate with the plurality of client applications, each client side component being operative to receive information resource requests from the client applications, to read a corresponding threshold time value, and to send the information resource request and the corresponding threshold time value to a proxy server component, the proxy server component operative to receive a plurality of information resource requests, and corresponding threshold time values from the plurality of client side components, to match up a group of information resource requests according to a resource identification included in each resource request, to derive a group threshold value for the group, and to issue a single resource request corresponding to the group of information resource requests.
In alternate embodiments, methods and computer readable media are disclosed to carry out the above system.